I am at the lowest point of my mental health. Lol

I hope it doesn't get any lower than this because I have reached my breaking point.

I have nobody to talk to. I don't want to be a cry baby, nagging and whining all the time.

My friends here Jason (from Zurich and not Australia) and Rutee07 were in similar position when I last spoke to them here. I wonder what happened to them!

Shall I call in for yet another superficial therapy session? Or shall I just wait for the feeling to pass and continue being busy?

I am Done! I am extremely burnt out and unhappy with my work. I have been doing this professionally for over 5 years now and much longer than that unprofessionally.
This new company I joined finally gave me the salary I always dreamt of but now I am extremely unhappy and depressed and anxious all the time. And I don't like the work I am doing. I don't like the team. I hate being isolated at home for over 2 years, working from home. I had a mental breakdown in the middle of the meeting the other day. And after that, I said. that's it. I am done. So, I gave the resignation letter. I don't know what I am gonna do. But I sure as hell can't do this shit any longer. But now, the fucking hr is making it even more difficult for me by not letting me leave without serving the notice period. I told her I am on fucking medication and I am having severe mental health issues. Now, she wants to see the medical certificate. Or I have to pay two months' salary. WTF? If I had that kind of money lying around, I wouldn't have slaved myself away at your shitty company, would I?
I went to my psychiatrist whom I have been seeing consulting for the last couple of years now. I asked for a medical certificate and he thinks it'll hamper my future career. So, he said I should get a certificate from a general physician. So, that's the world we live in then? You can't even speak the truth? And the way HR is behaving over the mail makes me feel like a total slave. I mean I am not at all fit for work these days, and it feels like, if she had her way, she would tie me down to a chair and ask me to push out code. what the fucking fuck. This is some fucked up industry and I think I am finally done with software development. But now, I don't have any idea what I am gonna do with my life or how am I gonna earn money. I am so burnt out and anxious that even the thought of working again gives me panic attacks. even working from home. What the fuck do I do?

"Writing good code is a charity". ( - saves time, effort, mental-health, & career of next developer).

I don't wanna hear anyone dismissing college education, specially from people that can't do asymptotic analysis and have no clue what a pointer is. It's not fine. What do you think people spend 4+ years studying for? For this shit? There's a reason why a diploma has a weight, it's not just decoration.

I get it that the american educational system is fucked up and you guys have to pay a shit ton of money for it, but you can't just pretend it's worth nothing.

How diminishing it is to hear people shit on a life long struggle to get where i am today. I had to study a ton to get into college, and I'm still pouring my blood and mental health into my studies, only for some random to say that a youtube tutorial is worth the same.

Not gonna lie I have toxic people in my life and I have caught myself in multiple situations where I behaved differently, did or did not do something just because they were near.

Whenever these people are gone it’s just the most beautiful thing to be able to relax (also in my mind).

It’s crazy what other people do with us and how we can exaggerate all these feelings and emotions. The best thing I can do is to get rid of this toxicity in my life and move on.

Anybody else or is it just me?

How are you guys taking care of mental health?

I feel down in dumps. Burnt out from previous job and life seems like a drag.

Any advice appreciated as I feel pretty isolated.

I think I’m going to lose my mind. This stupid website I’m working on keeps going down and at the worst times possible. Nothing we do seems to help. I’m again awakened in the middle of the night to attend to it and still have no good answers why. My anxiety is through the roof because I can’t get back to sleep after tonight’s outage. The client is beyond pissed even though a ton of problems would be solved if they would just get off of some legacy software and onto something more modern. But they insisted it be this way and the budget is already blown and then some even if they changed their minds. If it’s going to be that I continue losing so much sleep and sanity, I may just have to quit this job. I hate the thought of that because I always want to see things through to a happy conclusion. And I like my teammates and don’t want to let them down. But I’m too old for that kind of no-sleep development lifestyle now. Nobody’s shitty website is worth my physical and mental health.

Undoubtedly the most common mistake that devs do : Ignoring your personal health, be it mental or physical.

I almost went through a burnout before realising things need to change.

Changed my lifestyle upside down after that
- Switched from wfh to an office job
- I cycle 12kms a day now
- Got a standing desk for myself to be more active
- and have a journal where i literally dump everything off my brain

FML or how I made myself unhireable

TL;DR: Working as a QA.
Changed jobs.
New job sucked.
Left after three months.
Got laid off from the next one after 4 months (not my fault).
Got depressed.
Got a Dev job back in the first company.
Job sucks, cannot leave… (5 months in)

Full rant:
I was doing pretty well as a QA Enginner. Started with internship, then junior in company A, then big pay rise moving to company B, where I quickly got promoted to Senior. As I was nearing 3yrs of exp, I decided it’s time for a change, as things were getting worse project-wise and felt like I was regressing. Also I was constantly bombarded with offers of +50% of my salary I could easily land, while company offered 10%.

Moved on to company C. This is where it started getting rocky. I was told I would be working on this one project, strictly test automation, nothing exciting but an easy gig. However week in, I was told to work on this other project 50/50. This was a startup kind of thing. It was a nightmare. Only manual testing. Most tickets had only a vague title, no description, no requirements, nothing. How do one test something without any knowledge how it should work? Besides that, the project lead on the client side was aggressive sometimes.
The workload was immense - 4 devs, 2 of them doing heavy overtime, so the output was like 6 devs and half of a tester….
Despite raising the problems, nothing was going to change, nor I could switch projects. The job began to heavily affect my mental health. Decided not to prolong my contract and left after 3 month probation period.

Quickly landed a job in company D. As my burnout as a tester kept bothering me more and more I decided that this was going to be my last job as a QA and next one will be a Dev. You see, I never enjoyed the tester part, I always enjoyed the automation part more. The plan was to learn in free time and after 18-24 months start applying for a dev role to see if I can land one (switching inside D was not an option). All plans went to hell, as I was handed a one month notice by the end of my third month. A month before my wedding… I was told the company was having financial issues and was laid off with about 30% of people in the company (mostly new hires).

I got depressed. I wouldn’t get out of bed for a few days. I never thought something like this would ever happen to me. Standing by my decision I was applying for development jobs, but most recruiters seeing either only QA experience or my recent 3 and 4 month employment periods weren’t responsive. Applying for testing jobs was a bit better but still nothing like before C and D.

Since company B I stayed in touch with my former manager, and he kept telling me that a new team has taken over most of the shitty work, and they are now working on cooler stuff and have more coming. He encouraged me to come back, as he has always thought highly of me professionally.
Looking at my options, I could probably get another testing job with lower pay, maybe I could land a junior Dev with like 1/3 of my salary or I could go back. So in my dark time I have reached out to my manager and just like that he got me a Senior Dev position, same pay as in company D.

Finally what I wanted right? Yeah… As soon I as joined all the new initiatives were being dropped one by one, and backlog got flooded with bugs and sh*t again. Five months in I hate my job again. Cannot leave cause no one will hire me…

Where I made the mistake?
Shouldn’t leave B despite facing regression and being underpaid?
Shouldn’t leave C no matter what?
Shouldn’t come back to B?

!dev

There are two weeks left until the PhD application results are published. But I'm having such awful nervous breakdowns. I don't even know, if it's anxiety or if I'm literally dying inside from something else. From an almost-heart-attack today when I got a trivial and unrelated bad-news email, to keep having weird dreams about things like end of the world and post-apocalyptic life, or being jumpy all the time.

... And it's not like it's life or death, I know that. I know that I can do other things if this doesn't stick. I know things will workout the way they should; I know all of those. But there's just something destroying my physical and mental health right now, and I don't even know if it's just the anxiety for the next big step in my career, or something else, or how I should deal with it.

... Anyways, amannoyed.

How to manage when you start something good for you, start taking decisions for your good and people start spreading hate about you. It obviously will effects your mental health right?
How you guys manage it? I mean how?

Today I'm feeling of getting bullied and getting bullied again from the same person. I'm correct but can't show the correctness just because there's no proof I've in-hand.

I'm literally tired of people now!

Taking tomorrow off. I’m just extremely angry at all of this and need to take a mental health break. The constant GitHub and Apple iCloud outages have brought productivity to a halt. I need to get work done and the systems I rely on are down. WTF Microsoft? WTF Apple?

Someone in the #us slack channel posted about how, if other Americas were dealing with roe v wade, they could come to the mental health channel.

I really want to respond about how Americans are a diverse group, and some are thankful for a judgement that preserves what some consider life, and to keep our diverse opinions in mind.

But I'm not going to. I'm not stupid. It's not worth starting a fight or potentially losing a job over. So I remain silent, like a coward.

I earn a lot of money, enough to ignore ideology I don't agree with, and messages that would have been considered totally inappropriate at one time.

thoughts on term insurance/life insurence/ health insurence/ other insurances of this sort?

I am new to adult life but i personally find them very sketchy and screaming of a scam?
- Like if I die right now, do i expect some 3rd party to whom i just started paying a few dollars per month to give my family 100x that amount immediately?

- firstly, how can i ensure this , i have just died and my family would be in shatters(I guess) , they won't be having some worldclass lawyers or mental/financial power to fight over a dead guy

- secondly am guessing they are all about specific ways of dying, current salary, whether the family can survive on their own without that insured guy gone, etc etc. so basically everything they could make to not shed some money. So why bother? I am currently in a situation where the family is working on 60-80% of my income. but even with me gone, they can survive if they want. its human nature of survival, that's what made us come out at the top of food chain. so doesn't that make the whole point of insurances moot?
- thirdly how can someone guarantee a fixed income 'after death' when my current income itself is not 'guaranteed' , when 'alive'? here comes another pandemic, or some recession, and behold, am fired from my job. the. how come those companies guarantee an income in such crisis? Last time i checked, it was just an ugly civil war between insurance companies and common people when covid suddenly hit fatally to a lot of families. these guys were coming up with new rules and legalities to get away from paying to the families of deceased.

health insurance does somewhat sound okay, but at the same time feels like even bigger scams. in a nutshell, every health policy is like : "we will cover 50-100% of any major operation/doctoral procedure that costs x amount and is prescribed by a doctor if you keep paying us 0.1x amount every month for your whole life"
I see 3 problems in this:
- PRESCRIBED BY DOCTOR? obviously a doctor is a godly person that can prescribe a genuine operation based on a person's situation, but this whole payment based on word of mouth screams of shadiness. if someone said that "hi you are a technical expert. we won't pay you directly but whenever you are going to work on something for someone, we will cover your fees and your tools's cost that you tell to that person" . nice, am now recommending aws's most expensive ec2 instance to every mf that comes to me for an frontend issue.
- why do we need to have such procedures that will cost so much? where is the concept of subsidiary? What is the point of having an awesome technology like CT scan or MRI when no person could afford it? I know even water comes at both Rs 20 and Rs 250 bottle, but the rs250 bottle is a luxary, not a necessity . if a few people want rs 250 bottle then they can have it, hell they can have it in a gold platted bottle and pay 2500. but the underlying material is available to all for affordable price(if not free), right?

-------
Well that's all my little rant. I am intrigued by the business models of these fear mongering devil insurance companies. so would like to know your opinion on instances where these companies are correct and its beneficial to take an insurance

So I started out in 2010ish as an intern, entirely remote. It let me attend school in my home state while working for a company elsewhere. Fast forward to 2017, I leave that company to work at a college, as a hybrid model. Found I was more productive on days that I was home/working from the lab versus days I was in the office. Skip to 2018, I get a job working for the Air Force which is ALSO hybrid. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good for me as when I was remote. In 2019 I started working for NYS and had to report to an office full time. YIKES was that not for me. My mental health started slipping, my physical health went out the window, and I barely got anything done. Along comes COVID and I'm back to 100% remote! Well, NYS Gov Cathy GoKill is trying to push state employees back to the office, and I really don't want to deal with that unnecessary stress again. Ever. Does anyone have any tips for starting out or looking for employment in the private sector, when my priority would be staying remote?

Using LSP for a while now, of course, being also a NeoVim user, particularly attached to Vim's coding approach, I can't help but notice Microsoft's Language Server Protocol to be A LOT like Emac's editor approach to writing code. Was Emacs right all along? More so, have we actually slowed down software advancement by distancing ourselves from LISP-like languages, putting speed above ergonomics and marginalizing many would-be contributors that have more LISP-like thinking? I wonder a lot about the future of writing code and the importance of, at least pseudo, artificial intelligence in that future. As we all know how easy it is to write pseudo-ai code in LISP-like languages, have we also delayed artificial intelligence by distancing ourselves from LISP-like languages? But more importantly, IS IT TOO LATE? I mean, should we, instead of try "forcefully evolving" JavaScript, instead devise nem ways of coding with it that makes it more Scheme-like? This is a rent, but also a heart breaking moment for me, a devotee of languages like Rust, I can't stop, but wonder if my preferred language's perceived advances aren't only an actual coming back of LISP. Finally: it's heartbreaking to me that I just can't have a small sized Emacs distribution with Vim-like capabilities. Being actually able to kind of talk to your editor like emacs users could be a BIG improvement on developer's declining mental health stats.

ps: I'm not a natively English speaking person, please forgive tipos and other pedantic writing mistakes.

On another example of regressing for advancemente, the interested reader should read about performance differences and justification for it between grep and perl's regex implementation.